As of version 2.2 NEO4j does not support JTA anymore. Hibernate OGM NEO4j uses the NEO4j`s transaction manager - org.neo4j.kernel.impl.transaction.TxManager internally in the Neo4jJtaPlatform class. The TxManager implements javax.transaction.TransactionManager. Now with all this classes gone Hibernate OGM Neo4j has to find a solution similar to what kundera is using depending not on a preexisting JTA transaction manager on the datastore side. Further Neo4j implements a Object-Graph Mapping Library for Neo4j called neo4j-ogm. Maybe there is a way to integrate this to get a post 2.2 Neo4j version working with hibernate-ogm.